In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to light adjustments in After Effects to emphasize text. I’ll demonstrate how you can quickly and easily apply lights to your text and type in After Effects to spotlight objects. This is a great way to add some sleek-looking typography styles to your graphics and projects.

Add a Light to Your Project

Figure 1 (below) shows a composition with 4 different type layers and a color gradient as my background. Let's start with adding a light to this project.

Figure 1. The comp we’ll be working with in this project. Click the image to see it at full size.

Navigate up to the Layer menu and select New > Light (Figure 2, below).

Figure 2. Creating a new light.

Setting Light Options

The Light Settings dialog box opens (Figure 3, below). Here we can change the Light Type to a Point light. Feel free to use the Light Type of your choice now experiment with these options at a later time. We can leave the rest of the default settings for now and press OK.

Figure 3. The Light Settings Dialog box

Enabling the 3D Option for All of Your Text Layers

You may receive a warning window that tells you that lights will affect only 3D layers. In order to see what the light looks like, we'll go ahead and enable the 3D option for all of our text layers.

You can do this by selecting the 3D cube for all the text layers (Figure 4, below).

Gradients are a popular effect used in both broadcast and online video. You can use them to isolate something in your image, or add some style to your graphics and videos. This tutorial will demonstrate how to create and apply gradients in After Effects CC 2014.

Often as video editors, we're tasked with adding motion and life to the logos of our clients we are working with. This tutorial is going to show you a cool approach to inspire some ideas for your next project.

Instagram is quickly emerging as one of the top social media video platforms in online video, and "Instagram looks" have become instantly recognizable to social media users. In this short tutorial, I'll demonstrate how you can achieve some of these stylized filtered looks in your videos by using gradients in Adobe After Effects.